Indepth analysis of persistant problems in the field of community development. Woodstock's research reports contribute to the body of knowledge used by policymakers and community development practitioners.
This alert analyses a variety of measures of debt to provide an overall sense of changes in U.S. household debt levels and the impact of those changes on different groups of families.
This alert examines the service test evaluations of Chicago area large banks and thrifts to determine what information on services is collected and analyzed during the test procedures and looks at how regulators use these data to assess service test performance. The alert also discusses the limitations of the available data and makes recommendations for steps that might be taken to improve the effectiveness of the service test performance evaluation.
The report documents the decline in personal savings rates while explaining the recent saving incentive for lower-income people created by the federal Pension Protection Act of 2006. While the credit is a modest step in the right direction for providing lower-income people the level of incentives currently provided to middle- and upper-income people, the report recommends that it be made refundable to expand its benefits to all income qualified tax payers.
This report examines the reality of credit unions' claim that they honor the mission stated in the Federal Credit Union Act to meet the savings and credit needs of "persons of modest means." The report also discusses why it is so important that credit unions fulfill this statutory responsibility and how they might do so more effectively in the future.
